Fw: Global Declaration of Interdependence

[Peggy Holman, Open Space Institute (US)]

Per request from Bruce, I'm forwarding this article to the list.

Peggy

----- Original Message -----
From: <BLErickson at aol.com>
To: <usa at openspaceworld.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 7:25 PM
Subject: Bruce L. Erickson to Peggy, this an article for the Open Space
network!



We Need a Global Declaration of Interdependence

The Western ideal of comfort and wealth holds a hollow promise for
the rest of the world and provides fodder for extremists

by Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society

First published July 6, 2002 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0706-01.htm

On Sept. 11, in the most successful act of asymmetrical warfare since
the Trojan horse, the world came home to America. "Why do they
hate us?" asked George W. Bush. This was not a rhetorical question.
Americans really wanted to know -- and still do, for their innocence
had been shattered. The President suggested that the reason was the
very greatness of America, as if the liberal institutions of government
had somehow provoked homicidal rage in fanatics incapable of
embracing freedom. Other, dissenting voices claimed that, to the
contrary, the problem lay in the tendency of the United States to
support, notably in the Middle East, repressive regimes whose values
are antithetical to the ideals of American democracy. Both sides were
partly right, but both overlooked the deeper issue, in part because they
persisted in examining the world through American eyes.

The United States has always looked inward. A nation born in
isolation cannot be expected to be troubled by the election of a President
who has rarely been abroad, or a Congress in which 25 per cent of
members do not hold passports. Wealth too can be blinding. Each year,
Americans spend as much on lawn maintenance as the government of
India collects in federal tax revenue. The 30 million African-Americans
collectively control more wealth than the 30 million Canadians.

A country that effortlessly supports a defense budget larger than the
entire economy of Australia does not easily grasp the reality of a world
in which 1.3 billion people get by on less than $1 a day. A new and
original culture that celebrates the individual at the expense of family
and community -- a stunning innovation in human affairs, the
sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom -- has difficulty
understanding that in most of the world the community still prevails,
for the destiny of the individual remains inextricably linked to the fate
of the collective.

Since 1945, even as the United States came to dominate the geopolitical
scene, the American people resisted engagement with the world,
maintaining an almost willful ignorance of what lay beyond their
borders. Such cultural myopia, never flattering, was rendered obsolete
in an instant on the morning Sept. 11. In the immediate wake of the
tragedy, I was often asked as an anthropologist for explanations.

Condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms, I nevertheless
encouraged people to consider the forces that gave rise to Osama bin
Laden's movement. While it would be reassuring to view al-Qaeda as
an isolated phenomenon, I feared that the organization was a
manifestation of a deeper and broader conflict, a clash between those
who have and those who have nothing. Mr. bin Laden himself may be
wealthy, but the resentment upon which al-Qaeda feeds springs most
certainly from the condition of the dispossessed.

I also encouraged my American friends to turn the anthropological
lens upon our own culture, if only to catch a glimpse of how we might
appear to people born in other lands. I shared a colleague's story from
her time living among the Bedouin in Tunisia in the 1980s, just as
television reached their remote villages. Entranced and shocked by
episodes of the soap opera Dallas,the astonished farm women asked
her, "Is everyone in your country as mean as J.R.?"

For much of the Middle East, in particular, the West is synonymous
not only with questionable values and a flood of commercial products,
but also with failure. Gamel Abdul Nasser's notion of a Pan-Arabic
state was based on a thoroughly Western and secular model of socialist
development, an economic and political dream that collapsed in
corruption and despotism. The shah of Iran provoked the Iranian
revolution by thrusting not the Koran but modernity (as he saw it)
down the throats of his people.

The Western model of development has failed in the Middle East and
elsewhere in good measure because it has been based on the false
promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time
achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the
West. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be
desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout
the world to Western levels, given current population projections,
would require the resources of four planet Earths by the year 2100. To
do so with the one world we have would imply so severely
compromising the biosphere that the Earth would be unrecognizable.

In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the
world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past
and propelled into an uncertain future only to secure a place on the
bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.

Consider the key indices of development. An increase in life
expectancy suggests a drop in infant mortality, but reveals nothing of
the quality of the lives led by those who survive childhood.
Globalization is celebrated with iconic intensity. But what does it really
mean? The Washington Post reports that in Lahore, one Muhammad
Saeed earns $88 (U.S.) a month stitching shirts and jeans for a factory
that supplies Gap and Eddie Bauer. He and five family members share
a single bed in one room off a warren of alleys strewn with human
waste and refuse. Yet, earning three times as much as at his last job, he
is the poster child of globalization.

Even as fundamental a skill as literacy does not necessarily realize its
promise. In northern Kenya, for example, tribal youths placed by their
families into parochial schools do acquire a modicum of literacy, but in
the process also learn to have contempt for their ancestral way of life.
They enter school as nomads; they leave as clerks, only to join an
economy with a 50-per-cent unemployment rate for high-school
graduates. Unable to find work, incapable of going home, they drift to
the slums of Nairobi to scratch a living from the edges of a cash
economy.

Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological
sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem
better than backbreaking labor in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the
promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many
instances voluntarily turned their backs on the old.

The consequences can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast
majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be
to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of urban
poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As cultures wither
away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught
in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of
securing a place in the world whose values they seek to emulate and
whose wealth they long to acquire.

Anthropology suggests that when peoples and cultures are squeezed,
extreme ideologies sometimes emerge, inspired by strange and
unexpected beliefs. These revitalization movements may be benign,
but more typically prove deadly both to their adherents and to those
they engage. China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900 sought not only to end
the opium trade and expel foreign legations. The Boxers arose in
response to the humiliation of an ancient nation, long the center of the
known world, reduced within a generation to servitude by unknown
barbarians. It was not enough to murder the missionaries. In a raw,
atavistic gesture, the Boxers dismembered them and displayed their
heads on pikes.

However unique its foundation, al-Qaeda is nevertheless reminiscent
of such revitalization movements. Torn between worlds, Mr. bin
Laden and his followers invoke a feudal past that never was in order to
rationalize their own humiliation and hatred. They are a cancer within
the culture of Islam, neither fully of the faith nor totally apart from it.
Like any malignant growth they must be severed from the body and
destroyed. We must also strive to understand the movement's roots,
for the chaotic conditions of disintegration and disenfranchisement
that led to al-Qaeda are found among disaffected populations
throughout the world.

In Nepal, rural farmers spout rhetoric not heard since the death of
Stalin. In Peru, the Shining Path turned to Mao. Had they invoked
instead Tupac Amaru, the 18th-century indigenous rebel, scion of the
Inca, and had they been able to curb their reflexive disdain for the very
indigenous people they claimed to represent, they might well have set
the nation aflame, as was their intent. Lima, a city of 400,000 in 1940 is
today home to 9 million, and for the majority it is a sea of misery in a
sun-scorched desert.

We live in an age of disintegration. At the beginning of the 20th
century there were 60 nation states. Today there are 190, many poor and
unstable. The real story lies in the cities. Throughout the world,
urbanization, with all its fickle and forlorn promises, has drawn people
by the millions into squalor. The populations of Mexico City and Sao
Paulo are unknown, probably immeasurable. In Asia there are cities of
10 million people that most of us in the West cannot name.

The nation state, as Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, has become
too small for the big problems of the world and too big for the little
problems of the world. Outside the major industrial nations,
globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a
firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures,
ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Of the 6,000 languages spoken
today, fully half are not being taught to children. Within a single
generation, we are witnessing the loss of half humanity's social,
spiritual and intellectual legacy. This is the essential backdrop of our
era.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was asked at a lecture in Los
Angeles to name the seminal event of the 20th century. Without
hesitation I suggested the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914.
Two bullets sparked a war that destroyed all faith in progress and
optimism, the hallmarks of the Victorian age, and left in its wake the
nihilism and alienation of a century that birthed Hitler, Mao, Stalin
and another devastating global conflict that did not fully end until the
collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.

The question then turned to 9/11, and it struck me that 100 years from
now that fateful date may well loom as the defining moment of this
new century, the day when two worlds, long kept apart by geography
and circumstance, came together in violent conflict. If there is one
lesson to be learned from 9/11, it is that power does not translate into
security. With an investment of $500,000, far less than the price of one
of the baggage scanners now deployed in airports across the United
States, a small band of fanatics killed some 2,800 innocent people. The
economic cost may well be incalculable. Generally, nations declare wars
on nations; Mr. Bush has declared war on a technique and there is no
exit strategy.

Global media have woven the world into a single sphere. Evidence of
the disproportionate affluence of the West is beamed into villages and
urban slums in every nation, in every province, 24 hours a day.
Baywatch is the most popular television show in New Guinea.
Tribesmen from the mountainous heartland of an island that embraces
2,000 distinct languages walk for days to catch the latest episode.

The voices of the poor, who deal each moment with the consequences
of environmental degradation, political corruption, overpopulation,
the gross distortion in the distribution of wealth and the consumption
of resources, who share few of the material benefits of modernity, will
no longer be silent.

True peace and security for the 21st century will only come about when
we find a way to address the underlying issues of disparity, dislocation
and dispossession that have provoked the madness of our age. What
we desperately need is a global acknowledgment of the fact that no
people and no nation can truly prosper unless the bounty of our
collective ingenuity and opportunities are available and accessible to
all.
We must aspire to create a new international spirit of pluralism, a true
global democracy in which unique cultures, large and small, are
allowed the right to exist, even as we learn and live together, enriched
by the deepest reaches of our imaginings. We need a global declaration
of interdependence. In the wake of Sept. 11 this is not idle or naïve
rhetoric, but rather a matter of survival.

###

Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence with the National Geographic
Society, received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University.
Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three
years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, ethnobotanist and
photographer, living among fifteen tribal groups in eight Latin
American nations while making some six thousand botanical
collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk
preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that
led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the
Rainbow (1986), an international best seller which appeared in ten
languages and was later released by Universal as a motion picture. His
other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990),
Nomads of the Dawn (1995), and Shadows in the Sun (1992), a
Canadian best seller which will be published in an expanded American
edition by Shearwater Books/Island Press in 1998.  One River, a
biography of the plant explorer Richard Evans Schultes, was published
by Simon & Schuster in September, 1996. Davis was the host and co-
writer of Earthguide, a 13 part television series on the environment
which aired on the Discovery Channel. Other television credits include
the award winning documentaries, The Spirit of the Mask, an
exploration of the sacred role of masks in European and Native
American cultures, and Cry of the Forgotten Land, an account of the
plight of the Moi people of western New Guinea. His most recent
documentary film is Forests Forever, a critical examination of forest
policy in British Columbia.

Vaya con Gaia

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